In an age of enormities, the emotions are naturally weakened. We are continually called upon to have feelings - about genocide, for instance, or about famine or the blowing up of passenger planes - and we are all aware that we are incapable of reacting appropriately. A guilty consciousness of emotional inadequacy or impotence makes people doubt their own human weight.
I don’t actually take much stock in the collapsing culture bit. I’m beginning to see it instead as the conduct of life without input from your soul.
All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!
The two real problems in life are boredom and death.
Those who have a why to live for can bear almost any how. The necessary premise is that a person is somehow more than his or her "characteristics," all the emotions, strivings, tastes, and constructions which it pleases us to call "My Life." We have grounds to hope that a Life is something more than a cloud of particles, mere facticity. Go through what is comprehensible and you conclude that only the incomprehensible gives any light.
I blame myself for not often enough seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Somewhere in his journals, Dostoyevky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pry and dig away long enough, and lo!, soon he will hit upon the marvelous.
The stillness in art characterizes prayer, and the eye of the storm.
I am more stupid about some things than others; not equally stupid in all directions; I am not a well-rounded person.
...America didn't have to fight scarcity and we all felt guilty before people who still had to struggle for bread and freedom in the old way ... We weren't starving, we weren't bugged by the police, locked up in madhouses for our ideas, arrested, deported, slave laborers sent to die in concentration camps. We were spared the holocausts and nights of terror. With our advantages we should be formulating the new basic questions for mankind. But instead we sleep. Just sleep and sleep, and eat and play and fuss and sleep again.
I love solitude, but I prize it most when plenty of company is available.
I am a phoenix who runs after arsonists.
Art -- the fresh feeling, new harmony, the transforming magic which by means of myth brings back the scattered distracted soul from its modern chaos -- art, not politics, is the remedy.
Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.
Live or die but don't poison everything.
The first undressing of two lovers is a most special event.
All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.
The spirit knows that its growth is the real aim of existence.
We are always looking for the book it is necessary to read next.
"What do women want?" "They eat green salad and drink human blood."
I'm glad I haven't lived in vain.
In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.
Strict seriousness was far more dangerous than any joke.
I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos.
She was what we used to call a suicide blonde - dyed by her own hand.
I am moneys medium. It passes through me- taxes, insurance, mortgage, child support, rent, legal fees. All this dignified blundering costs plenty.
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